This Week's News....

This week in Math we worked on Line Puzzles. We cut out numbers and figured out where they went in the puzzle to reach a sum. A sum is the answer to an addition problem. On Thursday, we used our Adventure Books for the first time, which is a comic book for Math! We learned not to copy, but to ask for help if things are hard! In Reader’s Workshop, we learned how to pick Just Right Books using the 5 finger rule and we read the book called Goldilocks & the Three Hares. We “shopped” in our classroom library to find Just Right Books for our book boxes. This week, we also learned strategies to use when we get to a hard word. We should look at the beginning & the ending letters of the word and see if we can also find little chunks or little words we already know! Good readers ask “Does this make sense?” If it doesn’t, they should STOP and go back to re-read. In Writer’s Workshop, we learned that writer’s have a saying: “When you’re done, you’ve just begun!” We learned what we can do if we think we’re done writing. We can add to the picture, add to our words or start a new piece! In Social Studies, we worked in community groups, and made our communities with the buildings we made on the computer. Thursday night was Open House!!! We were so excited to show our parents the Promethean Board & Activotes (we call them the eggs). We recorded our voices so our parents could hear a special surprise when they came! Speaking of the eggs, we got to practice answering questions using the eggs. It was really fun! In P.E. we played football & finished fitness testing. This week, 3rd grade chorus started, too! They will practice after school every Thursday. Have a good weekend!

Class News

This week we started Contract Spelling. On Mondays we always take a pre-test and we decide how many words we want to study for the week. We practice our words all week long and take a test on Friday. In P.E. we had fitness testing. In Math we learned about populations and samples. We did a fun math lesson using different kinds of beans. We counted them & recorded our data in a table first, and then graphed our data. Our first theme in Social Studies is Communities. We learned about the 3 types of communities: Rural, Urban, and Suburban. We live in a suburban community. To see the different types of communities from ABOVE, we used Google Earth. We noticed that in urban communities, like Chicago, all the buildlings were close together, but in rural communities we noticed lots of open spaces for crops to grow. In Reader's Workshop we brainstormed ways to take care of our classroom library. In Writer's Workshop we began writing small moment stories. We learned that authors write about things that they know! This month we're focusing on FRIENDSHIP so we talked about how to be a good friend and read the book Horris, Morris, but Mostly Dolores!